2006/04/19

Email clients

There have been a lot of complaints about email clients on Mac OS X. Apple’s Mail is fine for low volume stuff, and it doesn’t scale so badly, but it’s no “killer app”. (For example, the web client to gmail is a significant rival, which is just embarrassing, really.) Given the lack of widespread enthusiasm about other mail clients, however, I haven’t spent too much time investigating the options.

Consider a sentence discussing such things that I came across:

It’s actually hard for me to believe that a company capable of producing as great an app as Yojimbo could think that releasing a mail application without IMAP support is acceptable on any level.

I’d have to agree. Hopefully Bare Bones are interested in extensively updating Mailsmith one day. One the other hand, Rentzsch has different ideas:

I’m still hashing [my own email client] out, but I can state even at this early stage, chances are this client is not for you. No built-in HTML email viewing. MIME attachments are not automatically decoded and written into the file system (only the raw SMTP message is stored). No IMAP. No spam filtering (!). No folders (!!).

And speaking of up-and-coming email client projects, I’ve recently discovered Matt Ronge’s Kiwi project. Judging by the screenshots, when this is released (open source, no less) he will be a very popular man. I look forward to it; Mail has some incredibly irritating idiosyncrasies and organising volumes of email with it are rather tedious.

Good luck, Ronge!